After several months of intensive work a new Retrospective version is ready to take log analysis to the next level. Version 3.4.0 is targeted at fulfilling all the requirements appearing in the complex enterprise environments. It also has many improvements both on the UI side, ensuring more convenient interaction and seamless UX as well as on the backend side, where significant changes of “stuff under the hood” make your searching faster whilst bothering your CPU less. Let’s quickly review the tastiest features of 3.4.0.

Sudo and su support – finally you will not have to bother your administrator about insufficient rights of your SSH user preventing you from getting to the log files

Jump servers support – when accessing your demilitarized zone (DMZ) all the necessary SSH tunneling will be automatically performed for you

Nice level adjustment – by increasing the *NIX niceness you will be able to make your interaction with remote severs less noticeable for applications already running there

Maximum connections restriction – another feature allowing you to control the Retrospective influence on the remote host by adjusting the max. number of simultaneous connections

Smarter behavior of dynamic tail and autofind – you no longer have to worry about different formats of your logs during monitoring. After detecting some new formats, Retrospective will automatically recognize them and simply continue processing without any need for your intervention

Is that everything the 3.4.0 can offer you? Not at all! When it comes to the improvements of the “under the hood” stuff, we have optimized the hottest spots of the search pipeline. We’ve also added some sophistication to the connection pooling ensuring that idle connections are closed when no longer needed. Other improvements, visible to you in the UI cover:

smarter host detection that greatly extends the amount of information displayed after testing the host in the host manager,

throughout support for windows shortcuts to both files and directories,

possibility to easily convert ad-hoc profiles (created typically by drag and drop of files to Retrospective) to permanent profiles appearing in the profile manager.

Clearly, 3.4.0 has a lot to offer when compared to its 3.3.0 buddy. We are confident that the new features make Retrospective completely ready for challenges encountered in modern enterprises. If the lack of these features previously prevented you from considering Retrospective as a powerful log analysis tool, we encourage you to give it a try now and see for yourself how easy and fun it can be working with your log files even in the most complex enterprise setups.